TV Highlights

Featured Music/From Opera by

About This Person

From All Movie Guide: Bizet's music has appeared in 85 feature films between the years 1913 and 2000. As may be expected, the overwhelming majority employ excerpts from or are full productions of the composer's most successful opera, {+Carmen} (1875). This innovative work offers many of Bizet's most exquisite melodies with rich, atmospheric orchestrations highlighting a plot, based on Prosper Mérimée's novel, filled with drama, conventional comedy, romance, and stark realisms that were shocking at the time: Carmen's blatant sexuality, her risqué discarding of men like so many picked flowers, the cigar factory women who smoke and fight, and Carmen's being stabbed to death by Don José in full view of the audience. Nevertheless, the opera became very popular and admired by other composers. Nietzsche declared that {+Carmen} was "the perfect antidote to Wagnerian neurosis."